276585 - Importing a calendar displays old, unwanted alarms/alerts (lots of beeps, alarm sound)

Status: NEW

(Calendar :: Import and Export, defect)

Description

[John Hughes]

On importing a calendar from iCal I find that Sunbird goes into spinning cursor mode and spends a 
long time attempting to draw new windows.

In particular, Sunbird pointlessly devotes time to attempting to display alerts for days prior to the date 
of import. I have seen it claim that I have 99 alerts to attend to when only one was relevant to the day in 
question. Moreover, one of the alerts was more than 6 months old!

It would significantly improve the user experience if this behaviour could be stopped.


Sunbird version: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8a5) Gecko/20041109 
Mozilla Sunbird/0.2RC1.

My system: 2001 Dual USB iBook (G3), Mac OS X 10.3.7 (Build 7S215).


John P Hughes

Comment 1

[Matthew (lilmatt) Willis]

Confirmed.

We could set LASTALARMACK to the date/time of import, or ask first before doing
that step.

Comment 2

[John Hughes]

The first option looks to be the best.

John P Hughes

Comment 3

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

Matt, dupe of bug 212076?

Comment 4

[Matthew (lilmatt) Willis]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Matt, dupe of bug 212076?

No, that bug was "I get alarms I've already ack'd from remote calendars" because
we weren't publishing the event with the new LASTALARMACK date showing the ack'd
alarm.

This bug is that when we import a file, we show all the alarms for all the
events with with overdue alarms, even for ancient events. I think a "Acknowledge
any alarms from past events" checkbox in the import dialog or something like
that would be good.

Comment 5

[John Hughes]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Matt, dupe of bug 212076?

No. Bug 212076 has a summary which reads "Everytime I open my calendar I get alarms for past 
events". The situation I refer to arises on importing a new calendar when "Import All" is clicked on.

John Hughes

Comment 6

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

*** Bug 310349 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

*** Bug 337150 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[Jason Gallagher]

(In reply to comment #0)
> On importing a calendar from iCal I find that Sunbird goes into spinning cursor
> mode and spends a 
> long time attempting to draw new windows.
> 
> In particular, Sunbird pointlessly devotes time to attempting to display alerts
> for days prior to the date 
> of import. I have seen it claim that I have 99 alerts to attend to when only
> one was relevant to the day in 
> question. Moreover, one of the alerts was more than 6 months old!
> 
> It would significantly improve the user experience if this behaviour could be
> stopped.
> 
> 
> Sunbird version: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US;
> rv:1.8a5) Gecko/20041109 
> Mozilla Sunbird/0.2RC1.
> 
> My system: 2001 Dual USB iBook (G3), Mac OS X 10.3.7 (Build 7S215).
> 
> 
> John P Hughes
> 


I got this problem in Sunbird 0.3a2 importing a Sunbird 0.2 .ics file and 150 Alarm windows loaded. Most of the alarms weren't even true alarms, but instead were just event windows with the title bar and no data, and just a thin grey area in the actual window area.

I also got an error that said "710 items failed to import.  The last error was:  2147500037" 

If any develepors would like see my calendar file e-mail me privately at [e-mail]

Comment 9

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

The bugspam monkeys have struck again. They are currently chewing on default assignees for Calendar. Be afraid for your sanity!

Comment 10

[cmtalbert]

Confirmed (again).  We are still firing all past alarms upon an import, regardless of how old the alarms are.  We do this in both Sunbird and Lightning.

Sunbird: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4pre) Gecko/20070427 Calendar/0.5pre

Lightning: (Debug build): 200704026 in Thunderbird 2.0.0.4pre

We could handle this by asking the user if they want all past alarms to be fired when importing the calendar or not, or by simply setting the LASTACK setting on import as Matt suggested.  Either way, the problem still exists, removing QAWanted flag.  However, I do not think that the alarm firing is the performance bottleneck in the current codebase.  I imported 745 events from the ICS file available here: webcal://info.vassar.edu/calendar/calendars/campuscalendar.ics

I downloaded the ICS. Then manually edited it to add in 3 old alarms.

The ICS file still took 3 minutes to import into Sunbird, and I do not think that most of that time was taken by alarm processing (since there were only 3 alarms in the file). 

Comment 13

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][📱📆]]

I don't think its smart to decorate each item with X-MOZ-LASTACK. If the user imports events, does not do anything to the calendar and then exports again the data should be the same.

What we could do instead is make use of a calendar-wide lastack (saved in prefs, not on the calendar) that the alarm services makes use of. This will also "dismiss" other alarms on the calendar, but as long as this is clearly conveyed to the user I think its ok.